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Broken Pieces

Jack Canon's American Destiny

Friday, March 15, 2013

"I grew up a girl, and I thought an unwanted one, at that, in the 40s and 50s in a forgotten farming and ranching town right at the Four Corners. We were surrounded by reservations, more of the unwanted, just like me. My ticket out was music and so on the old Baldwin my Mom bought me, I practiced until my fingers bled and I got a college scholarship and I was out. That was part one. The part with the family, which I didn’t even think was so great. My Dad took off and my mom had to work as a nurse forty-five minutes’ drive east. In 1945, that might as well have been the moon. So my grandmother kept me like an extra broom, kind of useless and in the way. Or so I thought. Part two was working for the government. That really took me places. All over the world, working for scientists, seeing their secrets, even when I didn’t understand what they were on about. When I did, the whole thing scared the hell out of me. Then , it all came true. Suddenly. Then, I died. I’ve left my daughter behind to tell the story. Maybe it’ll help." It would be a tragedy, in anyone’s book, if on a beautiful summer Sunday morning a little old lady set out on foot for church and just as she had almost reached the other side of Main Street in a little seaside village, she was brutally run down and killed. What if this seemingly random and incoherent event …the slightest blip on anyone’s radar…had, in fact, happened to a woman who had been granted so long ago a very high military security clearance; a woman who is never named in the novel nor is the town in which she died? Crosswalk is a thriller, a story whose dramatic arc runs razor-close to current events. The woman’s daughter, Christina, falls down a truly black and greasy rabbit hole in the wake of her mother’s death that leads through bio-engineering, weather manipulation, Naval Research, Naval Weapons, Atmospheric research connected to DARPA and through London, Virginia and Hawaii. The birthplace of her mother’s murder, when she finds it, lies within the circle of Operation Paperclip scientists still working in London in the 80s and 90s. Christina and those she joins with along the way struggle on to find answers despite being chased by Blackhawks, run off roads, betrayed by allies...her comrades include a Canadian civil rights activist who styles himself ‘Amistad,’ an old Brazilian psychic emigrated to Australia, and a chemist-turned-activist also on the trail of these psychotics; half a dozen ancient men who form a sinister cabal. The Gatekeepers are scientists, liaisons with the Joint Chiefs, a global industrialist of unmatched power and wealth, a US Secretary of Agriculture. While Christina is on her own mission to flush out those who murdered her mother, Tim Verzet, firebomber and ex-military pilot infiltrates the very nerve-center of the global poisoning operation trying to make it implode from the inside. One very well-placed traitor just about brings the whole effort down but in the end, the Achilles heel of the entire campaign, a campaign which has actually been in place for decades, is a very small group, led by one pilot on the inside.